For the third year in a row, we hit the road and tested mobile wireless network speeds across the country, putting the four largest mobile networks—AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile—head-to-head. Our approach to testing wireless service has always been to closely replicate how people use wireless service in the real world, and then measure how well it really works. That’s why we do the testing ourselves, instead of crowdsourcing the testing data, as other studies often do exclusively.

We take great care to measure the various services under similar and repeatable conditions: We use the same devices, so that the comparisons we make afterward really say something about the relative values of each.

Our wireless testing methods and madness

We chose our test cities for their varying population densities, physical topography, and cellular environments.

Our 20 testing cities were Ann Arbor (Michigan), Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City (Missouri), Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Omaha, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose (California), Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

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Google had a lot to say during Wednesday’s Google I/O keynote—so would you, if you had three-and-a-half hours to fill. And while new features in voice-powered search functionality, Google Maps, and other pronouncements from the search giant were certainly eye-catching, just how much of what was said at this week’s developer conference should make iOS device owners sit up and take notice?

Quite a bit, actually, though there was nothing that'll cause a parade of iPhone and iPad users to swap their devices for the Android counterparts. With the understanding that Google will still need to deliver on many of the promises it made this week—and that Apple has a developers conference of its own in a month’s time—more than a few Google I/O announcements deserve your attention, even if the only way you’ll give up your iPhone is when it’s pried out of your grip. After all, it’s a safe bet that more than a few people in Cupertino were keeping a close eye on Google I/O this week.

For developers

I/O is a developers’ confab first and foremost, so it stands to reason that Google would start off its keynote highlighting new tools and features with special appeal for software makers.

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Panic's $10 Status Board for the iPad is an app that fits a niche so spectacularly, it leaves you kind of breathless. Designed to display and update data from a variety of sources, Status Board offers an amazingly customizable way to display your most important data on almost any screen, from your iPad to an HDTV.

It's important to note that Status Board is a niche tool; it’s not something you're likely to use casually at home or if you only have one iPad. But it is perfectly suited to situations where you want to publicly display specific information that's updated on a regular basis.

Open Status Board for the first time, and the app walks you through a quick setup process to configure and create some of the app's prefabbed status panels. These panels are little rectangles of data you can move, resize, and rearrange in almost any way you choose. By default, the app comes pre-loaded with calendar, clock, and weather panels, and can also display Twitter timelines, RSS news feeds, and the subject line of your latest email messages.

Some of the panels allow you to customize the way your data is displayed. So, for example, your Twitter, email, and news feeds can be displayed as either a list or as a ticker; the ticker shows one message at a time, and it slides across the screen, sits for a couple of seconds so you can read it, then slides the next update into view. I loved the ticker feed, but was disappointed there was no option for adjusting the delay setting to something slower of faster than Status Board's defaults. 

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Searching Google is a quick way to find information, but more advanced functions can help users find more helpful information faster.

Travel is one category where Google is very useful. Type in a flight number such as “United 1111” and Google will return the flight status. Type in “time in Japan” and Google will show the local time there. Google makes converting measurements, be it miles to kilometers or teaspoons to millimeters, easy to figure out as well.

Nick Barber

Forcing Google to return more specific results can be achieved by putting a search term in quotations. For example, searching “chocolate chip cookies” will only return results that have those three words in exactly that order.

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A new feature released Tuesday from children’s app maker Kidaptive lets parents track the progress of what their children are learning inside the company’s first story and game application.

Leo’s Pad has been out for a year, releasing short story and game content it calls “appisodes.” The new parental layer shows a control panel broken out by child, and breaks down which areas children are struggling with and what new things they’ve learned. It also gives tips on how to increase color recognition, for example, and cites research for each recommendation.

Kidaptive

The company’s founders have a varied background in comic book writing, education and 3D animation, which helped create an app that children’s-application watchers say sets it apart.

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There’s nothing you can do if hackers get into a database with your password in it, but you can still protect yourself for all the other worst-case scenarios involving hacking. In this video, we go over ways to make your passwords harder to crack.

First, don’t make it easy on hackers by choosing a common password. Splashdata uses security breaches to gather 'most popular passwords' lists each year. The word 'password', number sequences, and other simplistic phrases or numbers fill the top spots. Also, don’t use your name, a password related to another one you might have on a different site, or a login name.

Instead, experts recommend using 15 characters, upper-case letters, better yet nonsensical words with special characters and numbers inside them.

Need help? Check out some free websites, like Strong Password Generator. This Macworld article on security in the iCloud age also has some suggestions on strong password creation.

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Mother’s Day is May 12th. That’s a Sunday. You don’t have that much time to get your act together. Luckily, Apple’s Cards app for iOS can help you send your mom a lovely photo card, printed on 100 percent cotton paper, using that fancy shmancy letterpress technique you love so much.

Here’s a quick walkthrough.

Launch Cards—and remember, though the app was once iPhone and iPod touch-only, it now works on the iPad, too. Cards offers numerous templates, but you’ll probably want to start with the flower tab for Mother’s Day. There are 34 templates to choose among. Find one you like, and tap on it.

As it turns out, Cards doesn’t think you should send mom a picture of some other woman and child. You’re prompted to add your own photo instead. Tap on the empty photo spot, and either snap a photo with your iOS device’s camera, or choose one from your library.

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My favorite TextExpander snippets

If you asked Macworld editors to name their favorite utilities, many of us would mention TextExpander. If you type for a living, as we do, TextExpander—or a similar app such as TypeIt4Me or QuicKeys—quickly becomes indispensable.

As you probably know, TextExpander and utilities like it enable you to insert fixed bits of text—which TextExpander calls snippets—by typing in short abbreviations. So, for example, you could create a snippet called Date that inserts the current date whenever you type in an abbreviation (I use .date) followed by a designated delimiter (I use the backslash key \). Once you start building a library of snippets, they quickly become an integral part of your workflow.

If you are already using TextExpander, I’m sure you already have an extensive library of snippets. But if you aren’t,

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